Monthly Archives: August 2009

I came in the door this afternoon from class to find an e-mail from the son-of-a-bitch (for those of you new readers, that’s my soon-to-be-Ex), telling me that there are all kinds of crazy charges going on my side of the American Express bill. I am so pissed right now because some dipshit is running around the world using my American Express credit card. They booked a trip to Korea…uh, HI, what the hell would I need to be doing in Korea right now? Then there were charges from France and another $2400 charged to Hotels.com. I am SO very pissed right now. I’m a starving student. My full measure of effort is focused on school, I’ve got no earthly time to be jetting around the world. If I would be going anywhere, it’d be to Hawaii to visit my pal KP and his adorable kids. WTF is wrong with people! Frickin’ thieves! OMG, if I got my hands on them right now, they’d so wish they’d never been born.

Ok, I’m done venting now.

So. It’s Thursday, and y’all have been dying to hear how my Composition II class is going…well, today, we got to watch an episode of the show “Everybody Loves Raymond” called “Ray’s Journal”.

Plot from imdb.com: When Marie finds the diary that Ray kept as a boy, he is embarrassed about much of the sexual content, but she is only upset over a single mean comment about her.

Now, I’ve never really been a big fan of the show “Everybody Loves Raymond”. I like Ray Romano. Who can’t love Manny the Mammoth from Ice Age. He’s dry, he’s funny and he’s very loveable in a clumsy kind of way. BUT to watch an episode of “Everybody Loves Raymond” is like watching the action in my own home growing up with my parents. I try to stay as far away from traumatizing television as possible, because let’s face it, you hang around with my family long enough and you’re going to walk out with the same twitch Inspector Dreyfuss had when he was done dealing with Inspector Clouseau! It’s that bad. You’ve heard of the good, the bad and the ugly, right? Well that’s what it was like growing up in my house and remarkably similar to an episode of “Everybody Loves Raymond.” So, even though it is entertaining and “cute”, it’s just not my speed.

So anyhow, Doc T puts up the episode and we all sit, watch and laugh. Admittedly, I did laugh, there were some sections that were quite funny, especially the part where Ray’s brother, Robert, goes through the meticulous process of placing a decoy journal (filled with things he knew his mother would love to read) under his mattress, where his mother can find it, while his REAL journal was in a safety deposit box at the local bank. Thinking about it, I wish I was that smart as a kid; with my mother who was as nosy as an armadillo in a grassy field filled with grub worms, I sure wish I would have been smart enough to open up an account like that to keep her nose out of my business.

But, as the story goes on, we find out Marie went through Ray’s diary as a kid because she felt disconnected from her son. However, I find that no earthly excuse to violate a child’s privacy.

At 14 years old, any child is a walking hormone. It’s the beginning of puberty. So all you have is a miniature adult with raging hormones looking for their identity as a human being. In most cases, kids write in a journal because it is a way for them to express themselves without being judged or laughed at or worse, ridiculed. They need someone to talk to, but talking to parents is the last thing they want to do because they don’t know how to approach the subject or they are so embarrassed by their curiosity, that they don’t want to share what they’re thinking with another human soul. Hence, in comes the journal, diary, blog, you name it, some sort of media where they can voice their curiosity and needs or misadventures without getting in trouble for them.

So we finish watching the video. We were given a fair amount of time to write our “Diagnostic Essay”, all this means is that Doc T wanted to see where we were as writers. Y’all know me, once I get on a roll, it’s all over with, I could write on a topic for days. However, the main focus, I think, of the exercise (besides gauging our writing skill) was to see how well we could analyize two halves of an arguement.

After we were done, we got into a discussion about how we saw the two opposing sides of the arguement. The question: Who was right, who was wrong?

Doc T gets major points for being the only man I’ve ever seen that can create a “disagreement soup” and have it be smooth and tasteful as silk. He played devil’s advocate with us as he prodded on the discussion whether or not Marie was right to go through Ray’s journal and if Ray had a right to be angry she did. But then the discussion went even further, to the fact that simply, when you live under your parent’s roof, there is no legalese of “Invasion or Right to Privacy”. When you live under your parent’s roof, it’s the “Law of Mom and Dad”. I can agree with that, but there is the small issue of respecting someone as an individual and the fact that parents seem to think they can get away with being disrespectful to their child because they think they’re prying is a form of being a good parent.

Either way, like I said in my essay, “There is no right, there is no wrong, there is only opinion”. There is no clear winner or loser here. Personally, I think Marie was an insensitive cow to be rifling her son’s room for anything she could get her hands on to be close to her son. She injured herself when she found the line in Ray’s Journal “I hate my mom”. All my life I knew my mother was rifling my room and I never gave her one ounce of respect, and I never spoke to her honestly because I knew flat out that I could never trust her. Marie played the sympathy card with Ray when she was confronted with the fact that she violated the trust between them by reading his private journal, she cried that she had no support from her husband and a long song and dance of “Oh feel sorry for me, I’m a victim.” To that I say a resounding BULLSHIT! She found it, she read it. When she found it, she could have glanced and known that was not something intended for her eyes. Did she forget her own childhood and her need, as a young adult, for privacy? It’s all thrown under this double standard of “I’m the parent, I’m allowed to see everything and anything I want.” Question to all the parents out there, would you allow your child the same freedom with your things? One hand washes the other folks.

What happened to Marie trying different ways or activities to involve her son in so that she could find an alternate course to be close to him? What happened to not prying into other people’s lives to vicariously live through others? What happened to just outright getting a life? Marie, like so many other parents, are victims of their overbearing need to possess their children. Heavens yes, I believe in protecting and nurturing a child, giving them opportunities to grow and learn, but there is a vast difference between trying to be close to them and having the common sense to be patient. When a child is in true need of a parent, opportunities will present themselves to get in there and do your job as a parent.

However, that’s all fine and good to say that, I don’t have children, so that’s basically talking out my ass, but I do have experience being a child with an overbearing parent.

So, like I said, there is no clear winner or loser in today’s discussion, however, being as that I’ve spent the last 7 years with no one to talk to and engage in discussions like this, oh, it was like giving candy to a baby, I couldn’t have been happier.

I think every single student participated today, I might be wrong there were a couple who didn’t have their hand up, but I basically nuked the classroom with my one last statement on the topic (I played devil’s advocate myself defending Marie’s actions):

What happens when you find something on it that says “Love you madly” like I found in my soon-to-be-Ex’s e-mail from his girlfriend? Does that give you the right to act? I know I acted on what I found, because I also found 30 pages of phone records between the two.

I might as well have shot them all in the ass with a cattle prod. They all became so uncomfortable with that. I sat there amazed. It was a PERFECT illustration of the arguement. How could that make THEM uncomfortable? I’m the one who has to live with it day in and day out while the son-of-a-bitch lives down the street with his girlfriend who looks EXACTLY like a Bassett Hound.

(I did apologize to Doc T for nuking his classroom after class.)

So, today’s class gets a resounding thumbs up! I got to write an essay (one of my loves in life) and got to talk about a subject with depth and meaning, all the while getting the point of today’s lesson:

Every arguement, disagreement or discussion has two (or more) sides, being able to jump with agility, grace and poise from one side of the fence to the other is the realm of the fair intellectual.

As a wise man once said:

“Make your words kind, gentle and tasteful, for one day, you may be forced to eat them.”

I know I said the next post would be on Thursday, but I’m sitting here looking at my books for class and I know I have to read. I love to read, I’m voracious when it comes to books. Cyberpunk by William Gibson, a bodice ripper/action novel by Sherrilyn Kenyon, even Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations” is sexy stuff. What I mean by “sexy” is that it’s something interesting, something that you really want to read and when you get into it, you just want more! But, much to my dismay, educational text is rarely ever sexy and I don’t believe it ever was meant to be that way.

As I look at my books, I think about the people who wrote them, now to me, I think that whomever decided to sit down and write an educational text had to be pretty passionate about their subject matter. It takes time, effort and dedication to write a book that people can learn from. Only problem with that, is that usually the passion that the writer feels about their subject matter is rarely evident. It gets de-flowered by technical jargon, the fact that you can’t make a clear point without offending someone, and simply, it’s all academic. The passion for the material gets sucked out by the sheer mass of information they’re trying to pass on.

What is it though about school and mandatory reading that makes a person procrastinate and not do it? I think it’s all in the word “MANDATORY”, we’re being forced to do it.

I don’t think anyone likes to be “forced” to do anything. I keep telling myself, “what do you do with people who DON’T want to study or read? You make it juicy and make it into something they voluntarily WANT to do”. The only problem with that, is that simply, educational texts are rarely juicy. They aren’t real “page-turners”. The verbiage is usually dry and is as about exciting as watching paint dry or the equivalent of a popcorn fart.

These days, in the wide world of electronic media, there lies another problem, that the textbooks aren’t a flavor of “Instant Information”. It’s not the kool-aid powder that you just put in water, stir and then you have a sugar high for an hour. Books don’t work like that. The internet does though.

In Graphic Design School, we had a neat section that talked about how a person’s eyes look at a webpage. They see the top first, the left hand side second, the right hand side third, the bottom fourth and the middle of the page fifth. BUT, here’s the kicker, if a webpage doesn’t load within 8 seconds, or if it loads and the content isn’t grabbing and enticing for the viewer to take part in it, most people navigate away from the page.

So, with that in mind, I look at a page out of my school textbooks. They don’t work like the internet. Now, if we apply the 8 second rule to a textbook, forget it, they’ve already closed the book, because in 8 seconds there is nothing but dry text, nothing for the eyes to get drawn to except for an endless supply of text that is technical, dry and just plain boring.

So, my task for the day…try to make the text on the page into something I want to read. To take the dry academia in front of me and make it sexy and juicy.

I’ll start out with my “sensory overload” list. First day of anything is always sensory overload.

Forgot to pick up my other book for class *eek* (I went after class and picked it up.)

12:45pm Sitting on the floor of the classroom building, sipping on a Coke and waiting for class to start.

Students sitting in the hall as well, cool tiles (it was a hot day), feels nice to sit on them and cool down.

Backpacks on rollers like a suitcase.

Rollerblading student moves effortlessly like a phantom down the hall.

Entered the classroom. Eerily quiet, 4 other people in the room as well. 5th student arrives.

Sounds – None – Just the soft whirring of the Air Conditioner.

6th comes in, then 7th, still, nothing but silence.

8 minutes until class starts.

9th walks in.

Chairs shuffle.

Can hear the slams of other classroom doors.

10th comes in – true academic with heavier horn rims than what I wear.

11th, a young aspiring athlete

12th a young man who seems to be on a mission

13th another young man who looks very insecure – like one of those high school boys who picked on other people because he wasn’t sure of himself.

More silence – the sound of turning pages in books.

14th walks in, wearing Lime Green flip-flops that looked as if they’d walked many a mile across campus, she sits down and starts playing with her cell phone.

15th – An introverted young man with a Beatles hair cut.

I think to myself *I should have found a bathroom before class 🙁 *

16th comes in – spitting image of the boy anti-christ that terrorized me all throughout middle school.

17th comes in – Looks like Wilbur Robinson forgot he was a computer generated character.

It’s 1pm, still no professor.

Watching the girl 2 rows up putting out the fastest text message I’ve ever seen on her cell phone.

Finally at 1:10, the professor arrives. A very stylish young man, could easily be younger than me.

Now, if I thought my raid leader in World of Warcraft F-bombed and ran, he’s nothing compared to my Comp 2 professor. I always thought teachers weren’t supposed to cuss in front of their students, but this guy, he used the F-bomb very stylishly. It was a very conversational “WTF” kind of thing. Definitely not what I expected.

He takes roll, he asks us to introduce ourselves. I take the longest of anyone. Big story, lots to tell, hit the highlights, mention the son-of-a-bitch only in brief passing, only that he’s toast, talked about Disney, a few other things, then left it at that.

Found out in going over the syllabus that there is a 7-10 page research paper due at the end of the semester. I nearly threw up. I started to ask myself, why the hell am I doing this again? There were a few moments of “I’m too old for this shit” and other things, but driving in the car on the way home, it was more to the point of that I wasn’t going to let it intimidate me…I said out loud to myself, “7 to 10 pages is nothing compared to the 2500 miles it will carry you.” (One day I wish to visit Hawaii to see a friend.) That’s all I needed to reassure myself.

Before I did my first day in Comp 2, I thought for sure that I’d have a blast in that class, after all, when I write an e-mail or a blog post, it’s easily 2 to 3 pages, and that’s just me rattling off what happens to me. But the 7-10 of a controversial subject (and you can only guess what I’m considering for my topic, “Religion in Schools”) is another thing altogether.

Not sure if I’m in like with this class or not, but it is my most intensive, 2 days a week for an hour a day. Lots of writing and TONS of reading.

Ok, that wraps it up for the “First Day” posts. Now, it’s on to the goods.

Next Entry: Thursday.

Stay tuned! Please make sure if you have comments to hit the comments box! Enjoy my experience with me!

The night before my first class in Nevada School Law was filled with anxiety. Law. WTF do I know about law? Besides the fact that laws are created to protect people.

So, I leave the house at 2:30pm for a 4pm class. Glad I did! I went and ate lunch, I got to find where to park, I found my lecture hall so early, that I got to sit outside and visit with another student before it was time for the class to start.

Now, before I walked into class, I wanted to observe one of the oldest and noblest of habits, the good ol’ “PB4U Leave” rule. Yes, I tell my fellow raiders in World of Warcraft this:

“If you’re going to sit in a raid or for any duration of time with no opportunity to go to the bathroom, treat it like a long car trip. Always pee before you leave, you never know when’s the next opportunity you’ll get to go to the bathroom.”

I treat lectures and classes the same way. You go before you go. There is no worse feeling in the world than being in the middle of a great lecture and having your bladder distract you from what’s going on around you.

So, I took the time before the lecture started to find the nearest bathroom which was housed in the Biology Building. Ok, one thing at UNLV you need to see…the biology building. Those Bio students have it good! There’s a garden in the middle of their building! Plants, trees, a pond…it’s really beautiful! But, being that I was in a hurry, I asked the nearest student the location of the bathroom, hurried up, took care of my business and ran across to the lecture hall.

I was smart enough to jot down a few things in the back of my notebook:

On my first day, this is what I saw:

Student wives comparing notes about being students and wives simultaneously (then thought how lucky I am that the son-of-a-bitch is gone so I don’t have to deal with him at the same time as school).

A Nicole Ritchie wannabe

A pretty & professional looking TA (who I found out later was actually the other professor that will be team teaching the class.)

An older gent with a waxed handlebar mustache that I swore was going to start singing a barbershop song any second.

A Frat Boy with his greek letters on his shirt trying to look cool.

Some Hippy Chicks

3 older teachers sitting together

a lot of pencil/pen biting

Me writing notes for my blog

see and smell future teachers all around you

A girl with a “I survived Barrens Chat” t-shirt on.

People filling out student info sheets

at 3:50pm people were still filing in for the 4pm class start.

The opening slide on the projector showing an overloaded teacher with the messages” “Take a seat at the front of the class” (60% sat at the back). “Pick up syllabus and lecture support material” (which was 7 pages front and back). “Complete and return student info sheet”.

People eyeing other people, some waving at friends.

Periodic table on the wall – a school law lecture in the Life Science Building.

Pictures of cell science on the wall.

Professor says we will wait on the first day for people to find the class, however after the first class, we WILL start on time.

The obvious occurs to me, is “Fashionable Teacher” an oxymoron? None of the teachers tend to have much style when you’re dealing in Elementary or Secondary Ed. LOL Fashion accident anyone? However the two professors looked, spoke and dressed impeccably.

I see older teachers comparing filled out forms.

Lots of fidgeting all around the room.

Me looking around. 3rd row seat for me.

2 plasma screens

1 pulldown screen.

Creationism mentioned – A girl in class has a little brother who refused to go to a mosque because it was “against their religion”. She just got filed under my “has no common sense” list. She was so proud to say she was a “Christian”, she offended me, I’m an athiest. LOL

Overall though, this was the class I was dreading the most, it looks as it will be really fun and very interesting. Doc McC hit us up with a very (in my opinion) messed up hypothetical. The story of a teacher who took a secondary job, 30 miles away from the town she lived in, to take care of her terminally ill mother as a stripper! He asked the class, could she be fired for that? I resoundingly said “NO”. Her life is her life! But the class was divided, lots said yes because they judged her before really understanding her reason for doing it, even when they knew her reason, they still condemned her. Me personally, the Principal who found her dancing at the strip club, if he’d been a Chippendale and some lady found him, would he be treated the same?

I found that my old addage “The Human Race NEVER fails to disappoint me” rang true. I found such beastly prejudice, such absolute ignorance, such narrow-mindedness that it turned my stomach. Add in the Christian in the row in front of me, and I was ready to hurl. I just was aghast at the fact that I try to stay so open-minded, see people for who they are, that to be in a room of 80 people who thrived off of being able to judge another human being without thought to their own short-comings was very distressing.

But all in all, the lecture was great, the way the material was presented was interesting. In all, a ton of fun!

I’m cataloging the events and emotions that go along with being a “Mature” student going back to school.

The Mission: To obtain a Bachelor’s Degree in Secondary Education, that’s right, I want to teach High School English. I don’t know exactly why I want to immerse myself in the High School scene, I hated it as a child, but to quote a friend, “Every day you’re not in a classroom teaching is a crime against young people everywhere.”

The Vehicle: The University of Nevada at Las Vegas.

Here, let’s give you my quick biography:

I’m 37, going to be 38 in just a few weeks, actually, I’ll celebrate my birthday exactly one month from today.

I’m not quite divorced yet. I have been married to an academic for quite some time. However, I went into a sort of coma or emotional paralyisis because I was never very happy being married to a man that, whether intentionally or not, I was forced to live in his shadow. It didn’t help things at all that he was an “enabler”, one of those guys who thinks that it’s his mission in life to save people. Enablers basically save you until they finally kill you, literally. It’s like having your dream come true, nothing to think about, nothing to worry about, everything is taken care of which leaves you with LITERALLY nothing to do. Then comes emotional paralysis, then comes death. That simple.

But as fate would have it, my married “bliss” would not last.

Being that my (soon to be Ex) husband is an extraordinarily busy man, I never really thought much of his work hours. All I knew is that he was like my father, a man who put his job in front of his family. I would be extremely fortunate if he came home by 6pm, and if he showed up by 9pm, I’d just take that as normal. Don’t get me wrong, my soon to be Ex is great at his job. He’s just a really shitty husband. He has no idea how to be a husband and I guess that’s why he’s failed for the second time at being married. If we went out of town, his work cell phone stayed on. If we went out to dinner, he’d be writing e-mails on his blackberry and really not paying attention to what he was working for to begin with, the ability to provide and spend time with his wife. We have a private account for our personal cell phones, but he always uses his work phone. Now, I rarely, if ever, talked to him on his personal cell phone. He barely used it. If I needed to talk to him during the day, I called his work cell phone but NEVER EVER did I call him on his private line. But, late one December evening, I catch him texting on his private cellphone that only our parents and family members know the numbers. His family doesn’t text, mine certainly doesn’t. So yeah, you guessed right, I come around the corner one evening in December, and I find he’s startled and hiding the phone behind his back. I ask simply, “Who are you talking to?” He says, “Oh no one, just someone from work.” I saw the red flag go up, but I always thought he was happy. But then he becomes all-engrossed with a girl he works with, and being that this is a public blog for everyone to read, I’ll leave out her details. But, true to form, you can guess what they were doing, I naively believed what he told me, that they were “just friends”. But, my “spidey-sense” was tingling ever since she called the house at midnight one January evening in a panic, right after the new year, saying her fiancee was going to beat her up. I offered to go with him. He said, “No, I’ll handle it, she doesn’t know you.” But then, I got a phone call at 2am telling me to pick him up from a hotel that, unbeknownst to me until much later, he paid $993.00 for 16 days so she could have peace while she moved.

So, here comes April. He’s off to a conference out of town. He’s running out the door, but comes back because he forgot something, and there in his hand was his private cell phone. Noticing he had his private cell phone in his hand going on his business trip, well, that set off another red flag. So, being that I’m a computer whiz, I sit down and start going through the phone records. I find 30 PAGES of text messages going back and forth from the two of them. From ones at 11pm while I’m raiding with my friends in World of Warcraft to ones right after he gets up and runs out the door to work at 7am. I found ones at 4am, 2pm, 9pm, 3am, all hours of the day basically. But the majority of them went from 9pm (when I start my raid) until at least 2am (right before I went into the bedroom to go to bed.) So, as you can imagine, I hit the roof. The worst of it all is that he called her right after leaving the house for his business trip at 5am so that he could go over to her house. His plane didn’t leave until noon when he told me it left at 7am.

I went through the credit card records to find out that he has been taking her to breakfast every Sunday morning since December when he told me he was going mountaineering and hiking in Red Rock Canyon. Worse yet, he took her out for Valentine’s Day and I got dinner and not so much as a card. AND here is the worst insult of it all, he bought her jewelry. Ok, no man in his right mind gives another woman jewelry unless she really means something to him. When I confronted him with it, I asked him, “Did the repercussions of your actions when I found out about this even cross your mind when you bought her that?” His response was the worst insult a wife could get. All that came out of his mouth was, “No.”

Much less to say, I found all sorts of stuff. Most of it would make the hardiest blanche. However, it was a moment I was faced with, and still get sick about, that my soon-to-be ex is basically a lying, cheating son-of-a-bitch. Worse yet, finally confronting him with it? Yeah, he gave me his usual response, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” So, the following Sunday, I wait for him to leave for one of his trips to “Red Rock” and lucky for me, what did I find in his private e-mails? But a note from HER apartment complex about her lease. Not but a day earlier, he had told me he had no idea where she lived. Believe it or not, the son of a bitch moved his girlfriend not but a mile and a half from our home. So, I patiently waited for him to leave the house, waited an hour and went over to her apartment complex. What do I find? His car parked right outside of her apartment. So I parked my car right next to his. I text (one of my rare moments) his cellphone and tell him, “I’m here at beautiful Red Rock Canyon and I’m parked right next to your car. Get out here now.” He takes 20 minutes (you and I can only assume that he was getting dressed) to come out. We of course get into it. How could I not? I just busted him at his girlfriends house! There was an exchange and then he said, and I’ll never forget this, “If your morality has gone this low, we’ve got nothing further to say to each other.” To which I replied, “Oh yes there is you son of a bitch, you’re getting your shit and getting the fuck out of my house!” So, I threw him out.

That was 4 months ago.

Since then, I made a decision. My soon-to-be Ex put me in some idiotic class in Canada, where we lived for 3 horrible years, so I could get an AA in Graphic Design for the Web. Now, let’s just get this straight. The class basically taught me nothing except for how to use photoshop, make me dangerous with HTML and confuse the holy hell out of me in Javascript. I learned how to use Illustrator and all the other yummy Adobe softwares, but gave me really NOTHING to offer a company. That AA was basically as useless as henshit on a pumphandle. So after sending out 1000’s of resume’s over the last 5 years, I never even got so much as a nibble. But over the last 7 years, I’ve been teaching in Online worlds. That useless degree did have some fruit to it, because I spent tons of time teaching other people how to use the softwares I had learned.

My marriage broke up because I was more valuable to my husband for the paycheck I brought in rather than who I was as a person. So if that doesn’t tell you what kind of heartless man I was married to, nothing else will. But, it’s not all his fault. I lost every part of me that he fell in love with so many years ago. I just went comatose because he took care of everything and left me with not one ounce of fight left in me. I look back now and I just shake my head at how much I truly dispise my soon-to-be Ex because he robbed me of my will to live. Worse yet, and the thing I hate myself the worst for is that I ALLOWED it to happen.

But, he’s gone now and I’m happier for it.

So, as soon as he hit the bricks in April, I got on the stick and started filling out paperwork to enroll at UNLV. He took 7 years from me, now it’s time for me to take my life back.

I got enrolled, oh, what hell that was, but, I got in, with 36 credits to my name from my days at the University of Central Florida where I slept through my classes on my Sorority House couch because I was working full-time at night. Much less to say, I flunked out of UCF, but had enough credits to become a Sophomore at UNLV.

I think of my failed marriage and the fact that I’m going back to school in a simple quote by Madeline Khan in the movie “Clue”: